... and Found
I participated in Lost: The Game on Stanford's campus this weekend, a puzzle hunt designed by some Stanford students. It was my first experience captaining a team and while my friends were not terribly experienced with puzzle-solving, we did rather well IMO finishing all the puzzles and the meta before the event ended. There was a very close call where we found a clue in a library literally seconds before the librarian was going to escort us out as the library was closed. There was also a fair bit of biking and a fair bit of searching for where clues were hidden and while I have a couple gripes about some answer messages being unnecessarily complicated, game control was very good throughout the event at nudging through the difficulties.
There were some standout puzzles and activities. I really liked a "simple" puzzle that involved a game of mastermind with countries.
List 1: Lithuania (2 black), Sierra Leone (2 white), Austria (1 white, 1 black).
List 2: Ghana (1 white, 1 black), Gabon (2 white), Russia (2 white).
Eventually you take (1,first), (1, last), (2, fourth), (2, last) for the location on campus.
There was also a good example of a typical Hunt-style puzzle "Odd One Odd One Out" where you get list of words with some characteristic that works for all of them except one member doesn't fit. Those extraneous words eventually form secondary sets that had the same principle at play. Some of the choices were creative (and at least new to me) even if I'd seen the basic type before and knew what to do. What I liked most about this kind of puzzle is that it let our whole team contribute in getting some of the wackier ones. One of the second layer steps that I got was a list where all the words but one could be typed with exclusively the right hand on the keyboard (the other word exclusively with the left hand). Other cute ones included the list "pink, silver, orange, purple" which on its surface nicely represents colors but in actuality is representing some other property that only three of the four have.
There was also a maze-puzzle using the Clark Center, the building where I work, so now I don't need to go about writing a puzzle for this location on campus. It has all its hallways and about 8 sets of stairs outside, so the organizers had put together a grid layout imposed over the 3 floors of the building that we needed to draw a non-intersecting loop through. Traveling this course then gave you letters that had been written on the ground in chalk. The message was awkward and we needed much nudging, but I plan to run "Clark Center repeats" in upcoming exercise days just for kicks.
The best environmental puzzle though, that fit perfectly with the Lost theme, involved finding a compass in a garden and then traveling "north" with the compass down this alleyway. In the middle you passed a magnetic spectroscopy building with an uber-strong magnet. As my team is continuing north, I'm trying to tell them to stop without alerting the other teams exploring the area that something is "wrong" with the compass. The needle is now pointing decidedly east at this building. We got to explore the outside of this building, seeing horribly bent bars of metal and spoons and so on that demonstrated the force of this magnetic field, and after much fun discovery on and around the building, eventually found the clue. Given the importance of magnetism in Lost, this was a very excellent place to hide a clue and will be the most memorable part of this Game to me.
There were some standout puzzles and activities. I really liked a "simple" puzzle that involved a game of mastermind with countries.
List 1: Lithuania (2 black), Sierra Leone (2 white), Austria (1 white, 1 black).
List 2: Ghana (1 white, 1 black), Gabon (2 white), Russia (2 white).
Eventually you take (1,first), (1, last), (2, fourth), (2, last) for the location on campus.
There was also a good example of a typical Hunt-style puzzle "Odd One Odd One Out" where you get list of words with some characteristic that works for all of them except one member doesn't fit. Those extraneous words eventually form secondary sets that had the same principle at play. Some of the choices were creative (and at least new to me) even if I'd seen the basic type before and knew what to do. What I liked most about this kind of puzzle is that it let our whole team contribute in getting some of the wackier ones. One of the second layer steps that I got was a list where all the words but one could be typed with exclusively the right hand on the keyboard (the other word exclusively with the left hand). Other cute ones included the list "pink, silver, orange, purple" which on its surface nicely represents colors but in actuality is representing some other property that only three of the four have.
There was also a maze-puzzle using the Clark Center, the building where I work, so now I don't need to go about writing a puzzle for this location on campus. It has all its hallways and about 8 sets of stairs outside, so the organizers had put together a grid layout imposed over the 3 floors of the building that we needed to draw a non-intersecting loop through. Traveling this course then gave you letters that had been written on the ground in chalk. The message was awkward and we needed much nudging, but I plan to run "Clark Center repeats" in upcoming exercise days just for kicks.
The best environmental puzzle though, that fit perfectly with the Lost theme, involved finding a compass in a garden and then traveling "north" with the compass down this alleyway. In the middle you passed a magnetic spectroscopy building with an uber-strong magnet. As my team is continuing north, I'm trying to tell them to stop without alerting the other teams exploring the area that something is "wrong" with the compass. The needle is now pointing decidedly east at this building. We got to explore the outside of this building, seeing horribly bent bars of metal and spoons and so on that demonstrated the force of this magnetic field, and after much fun discovery on and around the building, eventually found the clue. Given the importance of magnetism in Lost, this was a very excellent place to hide a clue and will be the most memorable part of this Game to me.